Prolific Playwright Gunderson Opens the Rep's Studio Season

Prolific Playwright Gunderson Opens the Rep's Studio Season

Article excerpt

Lauren Gunderson, whose play "I and You" opens the 2015-16 Studio
season at the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis, is one of the most
prolific young voices in American theater today. At 33, she's the
author of nearly 20 plays; many have been performed across the
country.

And most of them fall into one of two categories: plays that deal
with science, and plays that deal with Shakespeare.

The first group includes "Silent Sky," about pioneering
astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, and "Ada and the Memory Engine," about
Lord Byron's daughter, the 19th-century mathematician Ada Lovelace.
Gunderson loves to tell stories of scientists, particularly of women
in science. She is quick to say, however, that she's never been one
of them.

Apart from a few weeks in college when she majored in physics (it
didn't take), Gunderson instead considers herself "an advocate for
science."

"But I married the real thing," she says.

Her husband, noted virologist Nathan Wolfe, is founder and
director of Global Viral, which monitors the transmission of disease
from animals to humans in an effort to halt their spread. Wolfe's
work, which has taken him from sub-Saharan Africa to Southeast Asia
to San Francisco (where the couple live with their baby boy), might
excite anyone's imagination especially Gunderson's.

"I've always been a fan of stories of scientists and of the
dramatic stories of how discovery happens," she says.

Other stories those of William Shakespeare have also inspired
her work. "Exit, Pursued by a Bear," a comedy set in Georgia, draws
on "The Winter's Tale"; another, "Toil and Trouble," has been
described as "an uber capitalist hipster 'Macbeth.'" The two big
themes, science and Shakespeare, come together in "We Are Denmark,"
in which the ground- (or cosmos-) breaking astronomer Tycho Brahe
goes to school with his fictional contemporary, Prince Hamlet.